WMDE Technical Wishes/AdvancedSearch/Functional scope

The AdvancedSearch extension aims to make existing search options more visible and accessible for everyone. It focuses on the most common search options to prevent an overloaded interface and aims to use labels that are precise and easy-to-understand.

Here’s an overview of the parameters the extension already offers, is planning to add and cannot offer. Please note that all parameters that are not integrated in the extension can still be entered manually in the search field at the top. The list doesn't cover 100% of all existing keywords, but all keywords we already have discussed/looked into by now.

Searches in categories, but not in subcategories. This leads to very confusing search results. Instead of implementing this keyword, we were adding support for the new deep category search keyword that was implemented by the WMF's search team in 2018.

Searches for all subpages of a page. The results are unordered, i.e. different hierarchy levels are mixed together in one list. This keyword works in combination with all namespaces (unlike prefix: search).

prefix: will not be integrated in the extension because of its side effects: The value of this keyword always includes a namespace, e.g. “Wikipedia” in prefix:Wikipedia:Technische Wünsche. Having namespaces both here and in the namespace selection bar at the bottom (“Search In”) would create a very confusing user interface.

Searches in the source code of a page, e.g. to find markup. Searching in source code usually includes characters such as ~@#&*()-+{}[]|\<>?.\.

In order for the search to work, these characters must be entered as regular expressions. However, searches with regular expressions have serious performance problems. They create a heavy load on the search backend and often don’t deliver any results (i.e. they time out). Because of these performance problems insource: cannot be integrated. We don’t consider it reasonable to integrate insource: without regular expressions, because this would limit the applicability of the source code search severely.

Searches for approximate matches. This will not be integrated because fuzzy search is a complex concept and there is no short, easily understandable label that can describe the concept in the Advanced Search interface.